A white T-shirt hangs in a corner of my closet, the relic of a brief foray into foreign reporting. The newspaper I was working for had sent me to El Salvador during the height of its civil war, and an …

If there hadn’t been a good hops harvest in the fall of 1889 in southern Herkimer County, this might be a different story. But the plants grew tall through the summer and the grain was abundant, so a …